Further Reading

Further Reading

Last week, reviews began pouring in for Nintendo’s latest blockbuster video game, Mario Kart 8, and they reached a basic consensus: the series’ tried-and-true racing now shines in HD, despite a mixed bag of changes. Only one review diverged significantly from this judgment, though it wasn't to complain about racetracks or turtle-shell power-ups.

Instead, aPaste Magazine review said that MK8 suffered from a lack of diversity. “After 30 years, there are still zero Mario characters of color,” wrote author Casey Malone, noting that all 14 of MK8’s “human” characters are white.

Malone pointed out that it would be "atypical of Nintendo to introduce new characters into a Mario Kart game,” but he still concluded that the whiteness of Nintendo’s racer-selection screen “painfully fails to reflect the diversity of its audience.” Readers didn’t take long to criticize this criticism, but it's worth taking the concern seriously.

Abstraction and alcohol

Nintendo, like most games companies that rose to fame in the '80s, had to make the most of abstraction. Cabinet artwork and players' imaginations did far more visual work than contemporary hardware ever could, after all, which is probably why the era’s leading “characters” included a circle with a mouth and a single eye, a grid of tiny aliens, and a 16x16 grid of pixels limited to three colors.

The latter was Donkey Kong’s "Jumpman," of course, who appeared on the sides of arcade cabinets as a white carpenter (he eventually became the giddily voiced Italian caricature, Mario, in later games). In Donkey Kong, however, he was nothing more than a blur of mustache and overalls. That he was a human hero was remarkable for the time, as most games until then leaned on sci-fi and fantasy elements to make the most of underpowered hardware. When games couldn’t even handle a background color other than black, how were they expected to handle human diversity, let alone render human forms?

Then there are also questions about what "whiteness" in Japanese animation and gaming really reflects; the short of it is, Japanese viewers tend to identify with characters that appear white (pronounced eyes, blonde hair, etc.), but in the case of Nintendo characters, at least the color has been consistent, with few-to-no cultural overtones to clarify its application.

Whatever the reason for white characters, they quickly became a trend in games like Super Mario Bros. (all white), The Legend of Zelda (all white), Kid Icarus (all white), or Metroid (one character eventually revealed to be white and female).

There were occasional exceptions, such as Mike Tyson in his self-titled Punch-Out!! game for the NES. Series hero Little Mac spent that game fighting a veritable United Nations of stereotypes. The Indian fighter, Great Tiger, wore a prominent turban and carried a tiger pelt. King Hippo, who hailed from a tropical isle, didn’t stray far from the facial design of Donkey Kong. (The game’s African-American trainer had a limited in-game bio, but it made sure to point out his status as a recovering alcoholic.)

The Punch-Out!! character known as Soda Popinski was originally named Vodka Drunkinski. To this day, we doubt that the bottle in his hand was actually "pop."

White characters received their share of cultural insensitivity, too, from the wimpy Frenchman to the sleazy Spaniard to a Russian whose original name was “Vodka Drunkinski.” Nintendo even poked at its homeland's stereotypes by way of Piston Honda. This was diversity... of a kind. Nintendo wasn’t designing a cast of well-rounded personalities for an emotional musical but a cast of silly villains to pummel.

Still, leaning so heavily on stereotypes, even more than in a game like Street Fighter 2, made an impression. Punch Out!! was Nintendo’s first major home-console game full of screen-filling characters, as opposed to limited, itty-bitty abstractions. No other Nintendo-published games in the following decades had diverse leading characters to offset the one-dimensional stereotypes of Punch-Out!! (which, of course, continued in Super Punch-Out!! and Punch-Out!! for Wii).

“Exotic” '90s series like Startropics and Earthbound could have employed leading characters other than white boys, but they didn’t. In the case of the latter, the only non-white hero was the “crown prince” of an Eastern nation whose identity didn’t go much further than silent obedience and karate robes. Also, the WarioWare party game series has a cast of out-of-nowhere cartoony characters, but they too are all white—including even the afro-sporting disco lover Jimmy P.

By the time fan-service fighting series Super Smash Bros. expanded to a 34-character roster, it too reflected Nintendo’s narrow palette: 20 “human” characters populate Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s roster, and they’re all white. In fact, that game operates as a sort of Nintendo museum, thanks to its giant “trophy” selection, and its diversity offerings are just as scant.

Princesses as inspiration

With better tech have come expectations for presentation elements like story, spoken dialogue, and customization, but for the most part, Nintendo hasn’t used its modern, fuller-story fare as an opportunity to be more inclusive. Pokémon games don’t emphasize the African-American hero Brock from the cartoon series, while Zelda games’ “diverse” casts mostly come from clans of misunderstood, humanoid creatures.

By the mid-'90s, Japanese games like Final Fantasy 7 began making more strides toward character diversity.

Looking to other longtime Japanese studios doesn’t present a clear image of a company falling heavily behind its peers in this regard, however. The Final Fantasy series did develop character diversity in Final Fantasy VII and beyond, but Resident Evil’s longtime whiteness wasn’t quite remedied when Resident Evil 5 drew a lot of scrutiny.

But compare Nintendo to a foreign entertainment behemoth like Disney and things look a bit different. Both are massive, industry-leading companies, and they both target the West as a primary spending audience—and they’ve both drawn complaints about portrayals of gender and race. Over time, Disney has responded by ramping up its use of strong female characters and more diverse casts, even within its line of princesses, finding ways to play on stereotypes without coming off as one-dimensional or dismissive.

That's not to say Disney has become a paragon for inclusion and diversity—for example, the ending of Frozen didn't completely make up for a history of "men save the day" story lines—but for the most part, the company's strides toward more diverse storytelling have proven both creatively and financially fruitful.

That example could serve as an opportunity for modern Nintendo. The company currently has less of a diversity problem than an "originality problem," relying on sequel after sequel after sequel from series born mostly out of '80s-era abstraction. What’s wrong with using a region’s rich, cultural history as a starting point for a new series—even something heavily Japanese as Capcom’s Okami? Or if you want your Nintendo games to be fantastical getaways, why not throw an average, well-rounded human from a non-white region into extraordinary circumstances?

The questions of cultural identity—of how minorities respond to an entertainment industry that doesn’t reflect their culture—are too complex to fairly answer here. Still, I’d argue that film and television industries in the West have begun addressing diversity in a significant way, and they’re all the more interesting and entertaining for it.

Nintendo’s sales in the West are too big to ignore (they are larger than Japanese sales, for instance), and as silly as it may sound at first, the Mario Kart 8 character selection screen can serve as a wake-up call for a company on the verge of losing its industry-leading reputation. In the '80s, Nintendo ushered in a generation of Western kids who thought Japan was cool, only decades after World War II’s wounds had become scar tissue in their parents' minds, and that generation of consumers has only become more tolerant and diverse as a result. It’s well past time for Nintendo to respond in kind—to take design strides that would naturally allow for a more interesting selection screen in the eventual Mario Kart 9.